It is important to manage expectations and the last thing we would want to do is pile any extra pressure on a girl who is only 14 years old but Laura Robson, wow. I mean, LAURA ROBSON!! Phew. ENGLAND'S LAURA ROBSON, Champion of the World or what??? Come on Laura.

That was more or less the tenor of Chris Bailey's and Sam Smith's commentary on BBC TV as England's Laura beat Noppawan Lertcheewakarn in the girls' championship final at Wimbledon on Saturday. "Unfortunately the hype around Laura is going to be unstoppable," said Bailey, as the commentary team ratcheted it up a notch or two.

"I can see her being the new pin-up," burbled Sam. "She could be a cover girl for magazines like Jackie." That would indeed be some achievement as Jackie went out of business around the time Sam herself was Britain's No1 and subject to similar weight of unfeasible expectations. "There's the crowd on Henman Hill," continued the former British No1 and world No55. "In a few years' time we might be calling it Robson Ridge."

"We don't want to put too much pressure on her," one of the commentators said (dear me, no, we are all agreed on that), "but she looks like a young Ana Ivanovic - same sort of hairstyle, same hair colouring." (I am not sure who was responsible for this gem, as I was busy managing my expectations at the time).

Other names invoked as Come-on-Laura - as she will henceforth be known - swept to victory included Martina Hingis and Amélie Mauresmo, previous winners of the girls' title and Maria Sharapova, who apparently was lower in the junior rankings when she was the same age as Come-on-Laura.

A name not invoked quite as much was that of Annabel Croft, the last British winner of the title, in 1984, who, by the age of 21, had retired from the game. Croft gave a frank interview on BBC Breakfast in which she described tennis as "a selfish sport" and herself as unable to make the sacrifices needed to continue with her career. "It's very full-on," said the former British No1, Treasure Hunt presenter and winner of ITV's Celebrity Wrestling. Actually, there are so many former British No1s floating round the various Wimbledon commentary boxes I sometimes wonder whether becoming British No1 is little more than a step to a media career.

If it comes down to a choice between spending three years at whatever they call Cardiff Polytechnic these days, watching Jeremy Kyle, eating bad food and begging for work experience at the Gloucestershire Echo, and putting some time in on your ground strokes, the tennis might not seem such a sacrifice.

But as Annabel wisely pointed out, what seems like a good idea at 14 might seem less attractive in later teenage years. Girls change, said the former presenter of ITV's Interceptor. Prodigious talent or not, Come-on-Laura's further progress remains an open question.

I agree. I may not know much about tennis but consider myself something of an expert on teenage girls having had two under my tutelage in recent years. I can confirm it is awfully difficult to keep them focused on making the most of talents displayed in early teenage years. It is also very difficult to get them to turn the lights off when they leave a room.

On which topic there is a ritual attached to the emergence of a precocious talent like Come-on-Laura's which involves the parents giving interviews stressing that the prodigy is being brought up as "just a normal kid".

Laura's mum Kathy - who will have to get used to being the star of a thousand cutaways - said the family's celebration meal would be in Pizza Hut. Far be it from me to doubt her but I am sure a family living in prosperous south-west London, with a Shell executive as head of the household, could do better than Pizza Hut (not that I am casting aspersions on Pizza Hut, although their salad bar sometimes seems too heavily reliant on overly chilled green peppers and Thousand Island dressing.) It is just that tennis in Britain, despite encouraging noises from the Lawn Tennis Association, is still mostly played by those who get their pizzas from authentic wood-fired ovens. There is no immediate sign of a British equivalent of the Williams sisters emerging.

The good news is that British tennis is not quite as middle class as Woody Allen perceives it. After the men's doubles on Saturday I made the grave mistake of turning to Woody's film Match Point on one of the Sky movie channels. This may be not just Woody Allen's worst film but the worst film ever made.

I was reading in this paper on Saturday about a British film called Crust featuring a 7ft boxing shrimp and another, a comedy called Nine Dead Gay Guys, both of which attracted considerable investment for tax reasons despite being near-certain flops. Amateurs, I say. Citizen Kane compared to Match Point, which is as though the great Woody had seen a bunch of Hugh Grant-Working Title movies and decided he liked them, but without all the gritty realism.

Sometimes, though, foreign eyes help show us the truth about ourselves. Pat Cash, on BBC Five Live yesterday, congratulated Come-on-Laura but pointed out that many female tennis players turn professional at 16 these days. "You think she has beaten the best young players in the world but it's far from that," he said. He also claimed Laura was technically Australian. Spoilsport.